Tribes: Ascend is the world’s fastest shooter - a high-adrenaline, free to play online multiplayer FPS with jetpacks, skiing, vehicles, and multiple classes. The classic shooter franchise Tribes has been played by well over 1 million people. With Tribes: Ascend, the franchise is reborn – fast-paced, vertical, acrobatic combat combined with class-based teamwork and stunning sci-fi visuals.

Fixes/changes since TAMods v0.3

Per weapon customization

Again, this feature has been optimized and is now working perfectly, as if they were native. This means no performance loss from this feature, as well as no glitches (wrong crosshair for a few frames, etc).

Togglable HUD icons

The mines and sensors icons are now togglable. Light turrets and forcefields are still not togglable though.

Global optimization

The engine and older features has been optimized a lot, as this was starting to hit the fps. The heavy load has been put on config reload as much as possible to make normal gameplay as fast as possible. The downside of this method is that you may experience small lag when reloading the config file (= changing class with Enter), we will search a solution for this problem in the incoming releases, and the lag is not too bad (and if you're switching classes, you're not in a critical situation anyway).

Config tool updates

The config tool is up to date with the new features, and also has extra tools ! You can now click on the color previews to open a color picker and choose your color from here :)

New features

Permanent user mute

The in-game mute command is not permanent between logins, so this has been fixed with an external mute function. You can chose what to mute, and differentiate text messages from VGS.

Toggleboxes partial fix

This is always activated, and unbinds anything that can activate the toggleboxes.

Stock crosshair color customization

Self explanatory, you can set any color you want for the stock crosshairs now. It will only affect the white parts of the crosshairs (so, most of the crosshairs). This also affects the ammo counter.

Enhanced + permanent ammo counter

Mainly because of the users of "no weapon models", there's now a way to make the ammo counter permanent. Enabling this feature also enhances the ammo counter, that now shows "ammo in clip/total remaining ammo" instead of just the standard ammo text.

Custom speedometer

So if you didn't notice or forgot after all that time playing the game, the speedometer on the sides of the screen have terrible values. From 7km/h to 180 to be precise. Knowing that the walking speed of the pathfinder is 36km/h, there are like 2 bars in the low values of the speedometers that are completely useless. Same with high values, a thrust is around 150km/h if I remember correctly, so by pressing one button the bars are already almost filled. You can now specify your own min and max values for that. It's useless, but feels so much better when it's not broken.

Player names/markers color customization

There is now 3 color variables per team, allowing to control the color of the player names, markers, and markers for someone you're friends with. This option also allows you to hide completely either the name or the marker of players, by putting the alpha value of the color to 0.

No respawn timer in offline modes

For cappers. Because we love you.

Lua REPL

For the coders ! You can now execute lua commands directly in-game, by typing /lua in the console (the full one you open with ~, not the one line console). Note that this does not reload the config file, so if you just change a variable's value this way it won't change anything in-game. The API's functions will take effect immediately though.

Custom sounds

You can now customize the sounds for the standard hit, the airmail and the blue plate sound. You have 4 options for the hitsounds:

no custom sounds (use default ones)

static pitch (just play the sound you specified)

dynamic pitch (depending on how much damage was done)

reverse dynamic pitch

This feature also allows you to remove the hitsounds by putting the volume of the sounds to 0.

For this feature to work, you need to configure the sound files before injecting the mod. This was made this way to avoid re-reading the files on every config reload. Also, only .wav files are supported for the moment. And if you want more sounds than the ones bundled in the archive, this is apparently a good site : Tf2dingalings.com

You have to manually create a sounds folder in your config folder (where tribes.ini is) to make the custom sounds work with the config tool Fixed, the new config tool handles that automatically

Fully scriptable damage numbers

Everything is possible here if you know a bit of lua. You have access to the player position, everything about the damage number, and a function to draw. Create and share!

Scriptable bullets

Bullets are actually particles in Tribes. You can use any projectile instead of the default ones, for any weapon (that is, any non-hitscan weapon and projectiles because hitscans don't have a projectile). I also included a function to easily change the color of a projectile, because I know you are all lazy (I know this because I am too). For the ones interested, you can do much more if you're willing to do a bit of research. There's a way to edit almost anything in the existing particle effects (read: projectiles), so you can really create what you want. The most obvious things are colors, but you can change the shape, trails, rotations, etc.

I made a short demo video during the development, you can see how the easy things work, and the use of the lua commands.

Documentation

As the Lua API is growing a lot with the damage numbers and custom projectiles, the project now has some documentation ! Everything is available here, with a few examples for damage numbers and projectiles scripting. For the damage numbers, the available functions (draw, get player position, etc) are located in the HUD file and the functions you have to create are located in DamageNumbers. For custom projectiles, everything is in the Projectile and ParticleModule files.

Notes, bugs

As you probably noticed if you read the walls of text that I write for releases, I've not included the variable names for the new features this time. This is because there's a config tool since last release, so you don't really have to know all the names. For those who want to play with them, they're all in the documentation.

Another thing, if you notice a bug or if your game is crashing, please check this post again to see if a new download link was posted. There are often fix released shortly after the official release, based on user feedback, so your problem may be already fixed.

If the game crashes after changing a custom projectile, please PM me with the info about it, what projectile you tried to replace by what, if it happened when you reloaded the config or when you fired, etc.

Known bugs:

You can't use the plasma cannon as a custom projectile. It works with every other projectile I tested, but this one made the game crash, so I disabled it (I didn't want to delay the release even more, and if you want this effect just use the plasma gun or the tech's one instead and go from here)

The repair tool doesn't use a projectile, so you won't be able to use/change the effect

The belt items are not modifiable either

Seems to crash when alt tabbing on map change for some users using fullscreen

Setting skiBarMin (or max probably to 0) makes the mod crash

Download

Full archive, you can extract the config tool (if you do that, take the whole folder !) and the mod DLL from here if you already set up the injector.